Sunday, 1 February 2015

I. Ghost stories

The following excerpts, arranged in chronological order, come from the early chapters of Tome I. Since they are quite short by themselves and are all linked by a common theme, I figured it was easier to ignore continuity and gather them here. For the sake of giving some context, I included some text that was already translated by Arthur John Butler.

My first clear memory dates back from 1772 and evokes a wall being
destroyed. Destruction is always made to stir children’s
enthusiasm; a continuous activity may catch their attention, but what
is sudden, noisy, quick and moving always strikes them the most; it
is to the point that they would be less interested in the building of
the Vatican than in the destruction of a hovel. Indeed, it feels like
destruction is Man’s natural vocation, and when I consider all the
upheavals I have witnessed, I see a sort of omen in that first clear
memory of my life. Although this moment was fifty-five years ago1,
I can still see the two masons at work; I see their tools and the
layers of plaster they tore off, falling noisily and leaving bare the
wooden skeleton that supported them. But there is nothing more beyond
that. Without even knowing how that frame later fell, I reach my
fifth or sixth year without finding any luminous spot in this dark
night that surrounds my childhood memories.

After this vague time, or rather, blending with it, I find the memory
of these ridiculous ghost stories that were done away with over the
century; fifty years ago, every maid had her own to tell, attacking
the children’s judgement and common sense at the root, so to speak,
turning their ideas upside down, firing up their imaginations, making
them vulnerable to a thousand fears and leaving deep marks which only
weakened over the years. I did not know if there is any country where
this sort of superstition was taken as far as it was in Prussia; at
least it is truthful to say that some of these stories were entirely
veridical in the people’s eyes. I remember, among other things, the
pains my mother took to make me understand how absurd and even
irreligious it was to believe for instance that the marène, a
very small and delicate fish, perhaps the most delicate in existence,
which is found only in one lake near Berlin, was only brought into
existence there because of a pact, through which some former owner of
the lake had given his soul to the devil in exchange for these fishes
that bring about wealth and excite gluttony.

(...)

I met many young people in Berlin, (...) but one of those I was closest to was Prince Serge Dolgorouki, the nephew of Prince Dolgorouki, the Russian ambassador in Berlin.

This Prince Serge came almost every evening along with his governor,
to dine with my father. We often went on walks together. Thus we were
truly intimate when he left Berlin one year before me. I met him
again in Brunswick when my father and I came back from France in
1784. He received me with great friendliness and showed me the most
interesting sights of this city. He even gave me a medal with Pius
VI’s profile, that had been made for him. He later became a general
in the Russian army; one feat earned him a golden sword from
Catherine II and for a long time, he was the Russian envoy in Naples.
I had been without news of him for years when, as I was at M. Denon’s
with my daughters in 1822, Prince Serge Dolgorouki was announced. It
had been thirty-eight years since we last saw each other, and he did
not recognise me any more than I would have recognised him had he not
been named. I even doubted that it was the Prince Serge I had met in
my youth. Thus I requested M. Denon to ask him a question, and, since
his answer left no room for doubt, I gave him my name; he embraced
me, asked me about my sister’s health and seemed very pleased to
meet me again; but he did not go any further. “Diplomacy”, I
thought to myself, “must have hardened his feelings to the point
that he is now indifferent to his early friends; or is it that his
pride is hurt that I am now a lieutenant general like him?” I was
floating amidst these uncertainties when I learnt that, having caused
grief to a high-ranking married woman, he had become devoted to her,
had left the diplomatic world, had settled with this lady in Paris,
and that he now lived more or less in hiding; to avoid revealing his
name and rank, he had almost become a recluse. I pitied him with all
my heart, yet I found it satisfying to think that I could blame on
his position what I would have hated to blame on his heart.

(...)

Having mentioned Prince Dolgorouki as I talked about his nephew
Serge, I will relate an anecdote involving him. My father witnessed
it, but I could not get him to insert it in his Recollections,
even though he told it a hundred times. Besides, the story was
confirmed by Mme de Kameke and various other people, including Prince
Dolgorouki himself, who said one day as someone had brought up the
subject:

“It is not in my character to ridicule myself; and my position in
this country gives me a duty not to do so. Yet, as for the story in
question, while I see it as nothing more than an extraordinary
coincidence, you can name and even quote me, given that there are
forty living witnesses.”

After this preamble, I will tell the story literally, without
personal comments or additions.

Mme de Kameke’s merits and qualities, along with her rank and
wealth, had turned her house into the meeting point of the finest
Berlinese society, and when she lived at her estate of “Mon choix”
in summer, she invited her favourite people from Berlin for prolonged
stays. Prince Dolgorouki was among them.

One morning as the Prince entered the parlour around lunch hour,
those present—the ladies and a few other people, among whom was my
father—noticed his tired and preoccupied air, and they asked him
about his health with more solicitude than usual. The embarrassment
apparent in his answers made them insist; at last, yielding to his
own need to talk, he answered: “If, after more than twenty years
among you, I had any doubt about the way I am judged in this country,
I admit I would be pained to tell you what has been troubling my
sleep; but being sure that I will have to face no false
interpretations, I will speak:

‘I have a brother, whom I love very tenderly and who loves me back.
Having spent part of our youth in close proximity, we truly despaired
at the thought of being separated.

‘You would hardly believe the details of the last moments we spent
together. What I can tell you is that our exaltation was such that as
we parted, we swore than, should one of us die before seeing the
other again, he would bid him farewell. Well! Madame,” he pursued,
turning towards Countess von Kameke, “last night, around one
o’clock, I was woken up by my brother’s voice, and I very
distinctly heard him calling out to me and saying farewell. I must
admit I felt a very strong emotion then. However, I managed to rein
in my senses, to convince myself that this could only be a sort of
delusion, and to go back to sleep; but having heard the same voice
and the same farewells one more time, I could not close my eyes again
for the rest of the night.”

Everybody protested. Reminding the Prince of the good news they had
recently received of his brother, they recalled the anecdotes most
likely to reassure him; they argued on the impossibility of the fact
itself, and they blamed everything on bad dispositions and digestive
troubles, concluding that the Prince should drive all manner of doubt
and apprehension away from his mind and forget what they called his
bad dream.

But fifteen or twenty days later, he received news that his brother,
a lieutenant general in the Russian Army, having swum through a river
on his horse as he marched with the troops he led, was seized by
pneumonia and died within the same night and at the same hour
that the Prince heard his farewell.

A second story of the same nature seems to fit here; it dates back
from the same time, and I am equally certain of its authenticity;
like the previous one, my father witnessed it and told it a hundred
times. Although I could never believe in such tales, those are the
only two which I cannot disprove.

In his Recollections, my father makes a mention of Colonel du
Troussel’s suicide; he gave two possible causes for this worthy
man’s act of despair; but the one he favours is his wife’s
conduct, whereas this seems to me the most unlikely. While he might
have been absolutely determined not to go home, at the onset of a
war, an officer of M. du Troussel’s rank and character could not
renounce to fighting and dying in a blaze of glory. For instance,
Prince Guillaume of Brunswick, having resolved to die and having the
choice between suicide and a glorious death, got himself killed in
the first battle Romanshoff fought against the Turks, having enlisted
as a volunteer.

Thus M. du Troussel ended his career for other reasons than those
relating to his wife, for reasons that brooked no respite.

From the moment he had asked for an authorisation to divorce his
wife, which he could not obtain, his relationship with the King had
been strained, and it became even more so when he was reorganising
Prince Henri’s artillery in Magdebourg. These reproaches weighed on
him so much that he could not resist the need to pour his heart out,
which he did in a letter to Prince Henri in which he recapped and
developed his grievances against Frederick, while at the same time
writing a purely military letter to the monarch. Having composed the
two letters, he sent them. The Prince, who was only a few leagues
away, received the package bearing his address in a matter of hours,
and, having found inside the letter to the King, he sent it back to
M. du Troussel along with a note starting with these words: “My
dear friend, what have you done?...”

There was no doubt left. In a fatal mistake, caused by the
resemblance between the two sheets of paper, the letter destined to
the Prince had ended up in the King’s hands. This letter, written
without restraint, was a crime, and Frederick’s character made it
unforgivable. But the most cruel aspect of that situation was that
this letter compromised both M. du Troussel and the Prince, for M. du
Troussel could only have written to Prince Henri knowing that this
would not displease him. As he pondered this, M. du Troussel realised
that he had denounced his benefactor, and in his despair, he resolved
to die immediately. He spent a few hours writing farewell letters,
and, at three in the morning, he blew his brains out.

Now, Mme du Troussel had had three daughters from her first marriage
with a M. de Kleist. The youngest, whom her stepfather loved
tenderly, was called Minette.

Just as M. du Troussel killed himself in Magdebourg, Minette, who
slept in the same room as her two sisters in Berlin, woke up with
horrible screams. Her sisters tried to ask her what was wrong and to
snap her out of this, but Minette did not listen to them, only
repeating in a frightened voice: “I can see my father, he is
covered in blood... There he is... There he is...” The two sisters
left their beds, lit a candle, examined the room, found nothing, and
yet they could neither reassure Minette nor calm her down.

Mme du Troussel was told this as soon as she woke up; on that day,
she was entertaining a large company. At the end of the dinner, the
conversation turned towards Minette’s extravagances; she was
severely scolded and cried much, but on the next morning, they learnt
the death of M. du Troussel, a death whose date, hour and main
circumstance coincided eerily with Minette’s vision.

My father once told these anecdotes do Mme de Genlis, who, far from
looking surprised, countered with several of the same kind and
claimed, among other things, that at the very moment her only son
died, she was in bed and she distinctly saw him hovering over her
head in the shape of a blue-winged angel. Those were her own
expressions.

What can I add about these stories, no less bizarre than their
subject? … Only one word. Born with as much imagination and
sensitivity as anyone in the world, twice in my life, at times where
I was distraught by my pain, I tried to summon such apparitions with
all the exaltation and willpower I could muster; thus I went at night
on the places of my misfortunes; I went after dusk to perform
evocations over tombs, and, as you can imagine, I never heard or saw
anything; which, under the double effect of painful experience and
common sense, irrevocably reduced such undeniable facts, in my mind,
to illusions of the senses or extraordinary coincidences, less
extraordinary however than such stories could be.

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Who am I?

A few words to get started...

This blog will be a repository of texts from a particular era of French history. Not just the Empire, though, obviously there will be some (well, hopefully, a lot of) spillover into the French Revolution and the Restoration, perhaps all the way to the July Monarchy. But the years 1804-1815 will be the pivot of most of the works I would like to feature here.

I am no writer. At best, I am a translator, and an amateur one at that. But considering the sheer amount of memoirs from that era that were not translated into English, or at least, aren't available in fully free versions like the originals, I figured this would be useful for some, so there I am, trying to fill in the blanks in the material available for English-speakers with a passing interest in Napoleonic history.

Unless stated otherwise, I got all of my material from Gallica, and I do not intend to use it for any commercial purpose, so hopefully all will be well and fine regarding legal matters.